Mead: one of the world’s oldest drinks – and what the word reveals 🏺

The English word mead (Old English meodu) goes back to an Indo-European root meaning both “honey” and “sweet drink”. The same root gave Sanskrit madhu (sweet drink, mead, honey), Russian mjod (honey) and Greek methy, which means wine.

A curiosity for anyone living in Hungary: the Hungarian word for honey, méz, belongs to the same family. It goes back to the Finno-Ugric period, and it came, even earlier, from an Indo-European language. According to the Uralic etymological database of the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics (Nyelvtudományi Intézet), the root word meant both honey and a drink fermented from honey. Its relatives are Finnish and Estonian mesi – in Finnish it now means nectar.

The Hungarian word for bee, méh, sounds similar but comes from a different root: it is another very old borrowing, related to Sanskrit makṣā (bee). The Hungarian for wax, viasz, is a Slavic loanword whose old form was viaszk. The second half of méhser, ser – an older form of sör, beer – is a wandering word of disputed origin. A nice parallel: Udmurt, a Finno-Ugric language spoken in Russia, has a similar compound, mu-sur, which literally means honey beer.

In pottery from the Neolithic village of Jiahu in China, traces of a drink fermented from rice, honey and fruit were found, dating from the 7th millennium BC. It is among the earliest known fermented drinks made by humans – not pure mead but a mixed drink, though honey was already in it.

There are many finds in Europe too. In the grave of the Egtved Girl in Denmark, some 3,300 years ago, a birch-bark bucket held the remains of a beer-like drink sweetened with honey. In the Celtic chieftain’s grave at Hochdorf in Germany, around 530 BC, a bronze cauldron holding about 500 litres was filled with mead at the burial.

In 448, the rhetorician Priscus visited Attila’s court as a member of a Byzantine embassy. He wrote that in the villages they were given millet instead of wheat, and instead of wine a drink the locals called medos; their attendants received a drink made from barley, called kamos. Researchers – among them the Hungarian Turkologist Gyula Németh – interpret medos as mead and kamos as barley beer. Which language the word medos comes from is still debated.

According to the Hungarian Ethnographic Lexicon (Magyar Néprajzi Lexikon), méhser was boiled from honey diluted with water, spiced with nutmeg, coriander and sometimes hops, and then fermented. It was a much-loved drink in medieval Hungary, featured among the dues serfs owed their landlords, and according to researchers it spread with German settlers.

Among its makers were the gingerbread makers (mézeskalácsosok): from the comb honey they bought they made candles, gingerbread and mead, and sold them at fairs and church festivals. Their guilds were formed in the early 17th century – you can read about the history of gingerbread in our piece on baking and cooking with honey. Mead gradually lost its popularity in the 18th and 19th centuries until it was no longer made at all; cookbooks from the early 19th century still described brewing it at home.

In Poland, mead – miód pitny in Polish, “honey for drinking” – is still a living tradition. Since 2008, four types have been protected in the European Union as Traditional Specialities Guaranteed, defined by the ratio of honey to water: półtorak (1 part honey to half a part water), dwójniak (1:1), trójniak (1:2) and czwórniak (1:3).

Legally, no. Under EU rules, only a drink fermented from fresh grapes or grape must can be called wine. In the customs tariff, mead is listed under “other fermented beverages”, alongside cider, perry and sake. So honey wine is an everyday name, not an official wine category.

You often read that the honeymoon got its name because newlyweds used to drink mead for a month after the wedding (the same story is told in Hungary about mézeshetek, “honey weeks”). There is no reliable source for this. The English word honeymoon has been recorded since the 1540s, and according to etymological dictionaries it refers to the first, sweet period of marriage waning like the moon.

Honey really was part of wedding customs, though: according to the Hungarian Ethnographic Lexicon, the young couple tasted honey “so that their life would be just as sweet”.